Monday, August 11, 2008

The Path Bar in the Finder!

Since OS X Leopard, you can add the path bar to any Finder window. This will show all the info about where the file is located on your hard drive. Double-clicking on any folder displayed in the path bar will bring you back to that folder. To display the path bar, go to the View menu and choose "Show Path Bar". There is unfortunately no keyboard shortcut assigned to that feature.

When searching for something on my computer, Spotlight returns all instances of the file even if it is on a backup drive. I see two of every file type, and then I have to look at the path to see which one is where.

What I want to do is to specify what folder or set of folders the file may be in and narrow the search results.

I can click on the plus sign to limit my search to what kind of file, but not to a suspected location ?????

James, you may want to go to system preferences > spotlight, and choose the "privacy tab". There you can specify that Spotlight should never include your back-up drive in the search. Also you can exclude specific folders.